MOVIES FOR INSOMNIACS - THIS WEEKEND'S MIDNIGHT PICKS

Is 2019’s CATS the first true midnight movie for the new decade? It was inevitable and there are a few sessions to see what all the bad buzz is about. Plus a slew of cult faves for your late night viewing pleasure.

FRIDAY

Fri Jan 31st: The COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE midnight shows continue with John Carpenter's THEY LIVE (1988) in 35mm.

Fri Jan 31st: The long standing tradition of ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) screens tonight at the MICHIGAN THEATER. Audience participation a must! Also at The CINEPOLIS in NYC.

Fri Jan 31st: Tarantino's personal 35mm Print of DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012) screens at LA's NEW BEVERLY

Fri Jan 31st: Fast becoming a midnight movie of The Room proportions, the CGI train wreck of CATS (2019) is gaining massive popularity as a late night fave. Screens tonight at SYNDICATED in Brooklyn, NY and also as ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE Brooklyn NY for their 'Rowdy Session' special. Meow.

SATURDAY

Sat Feb 1st: Jordan Peele's US (2019) reigns as one of the great horror thrillers of the last decade. Screens at The COOLIDGE CORNER THEATER.

Sat Feb 1st: Also at THE COOLIDGE, jump on board the aforementioned crazy train, and the first cult late night movie of the 2020s, that is CATS (2019), for a rowdy midnight session.

Sat Feb 1st: A Free Midnight Show of incredibly rare vintage trailers with THE COMING SOON TRAILER SHOW showcasing the NEW BEVERLY CINEMA's upcoming schedule, plus shorts, snipes, ads, and other stunning surprises culled from their vast archive of 35mm treasures!

FRIDAY & SATURDAY

Fri Jan 31st / Sat Feb 1st: Catch CRY BABY (1990), John Waters' musical tribute to 1950s rebellion flicks in 35mm at Chicago's MUSIC BOX THEATER. Full vinyl DJ set from 11:30pm.

Fri Jan 31st / Sat Feb 1st: At Brooklyn NY's NITEHAWK CINEMA, it's the indie cat and mouse thriller HARD CANDY (2005) starring Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson.

Fri Jan 31st / Sat Feb 1st: The IFC CENTER in NYC continues it's traditional block of midnight movies with TERMINATOR 2 (1991), CHILDREN OF MEN (2006), MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001 - New 4K Restoration), THE SHINING (1980 - 11:45pm start) and SUSPIRIA (1977 - New 4K Restoration).

Fri Jan 24th & Sat Jan 25th: A tale of revenge in the modern Korean classic LADY VENGEANCE (2005), screening in 35mm at The Nitehawk Cinema, Brooklyn NY.

Sat Jan 25th: One of the ultimate uses of practical effects in horror, THE THING (1982) is pure John Carpenter. Still so visceral, it wipes the floor with much of the modern CGI effects in the genre. At The Coolidge Corner Theater in Massachusetts.

Sat Jan 25th: Give yourself over to absolute pleasure with THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975). Screens in 35mm at Chicago's Music Box Theatre with shadow cast and full RHPS kit for complete audience participation. Also screening Fri Jan 24th at The Plaza Theatre in Atlanta and NYC's Cinepolis Theatre Fri and Sat.

ROAD RAGE AT IFC NEW YORK

IFC Center in New York is currently charging their way through their fuel injected Spring lineup of “Waverly Midnights” cult movie programming. Under the banner of “Road Rage,” IFC invites you to buckle up and indulge in some cinematic car culture. The series kicked off earlier in April and is winding it's way through modern and past classics, including great car chases like THE FRENCH CONNECTION; Jean-Luc Godard’s WEEKEND, with a traffic jam from hell and more. Sessions start at midnight. Here's what's coming up;
 

VANISHING POINT (DCP)
Friday, May 5th & Saturday, May 6th

“Crashing through American culture, the cinematic super-charged, white-lightning VANISHING POINT presses ever onward — solidifying its legacy as one of the greatest car chase movies to ever be capture on celluloid. While hell-on-wheels anti-hero barrels through police blockades, the film takes a more subtle approach when spinning its social commentary on early-’70s America. Fast cars, cliché cops, and naked chicks veil VANISHING POINT’s attack on American censorship, conformity, and racism — cruising toward the moment when American liberties disappear into the horizon.

“Kowalski (Barry Newman) is a pill-popping speed-freak who runs cars from Colorado to California for a delivery service. A former derby car racer, Vietnam vet, and police officer, Kowalski rejects the oppression of the coppers who try to stop him as he speeds toward his destination for no other reason than he’s a lone man on the open road of freedom and he has to make good time. From scene one, the white Dodge Charger moves at breakneck pace while of the film’s character information is told in flashbacks. The car chase action is furious, unrelenting, and is often peppered by a blind, black radio DJ named Super Soul, who updates us on Kowalski’s actions and frames [him] as the last American hero.” – filmcritic.com

WHITE LIGHTNING (1973 / 35mm print)
Friday, May 12th & Saturday, May 13th

“In form, WHITE LIGHTNING is straightforward revenge melodrama. Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds), a convicted Arkansas moonshiner, is let out of prison so he can help establish evidence for a Federal case against a particularly evil and law-breaking small-town sheriff (Ned Beatty). But Gator has his own reasons, the sheriff’s killing of his college-student kid brother mainly because the boy wore his hair long and espoused good government, and he means to get more than evidence.

“Burt Reynolds may by now have a bare-chest clause in his contract, because you see a lot of his bare chest—for example, in flirtation scenes with Miss Billingsley where you don’t see any of hers. What you do see of her is a rather complex and subtle characterization of a girl more vulnerable than she seems. In fact, all the local types, like Matt Clark, Bo Hopkins, or R. G. Armstrong (all in the moonshine business) are more complete and more resilient than the situation strictly demands.

“Ned Beatty makes of Sheriff Connors one of those… phlegmatic manifestations of evil that have from time to time been such a specialty of the South as shown in American movies. And there are sequences involving him—some of the best take place inside the sheriff’s office — that seem unexpectedly intricate and cleverly paced, and on the way to rather exciting film making.” –New York Times
 

THE DRIVER (1978 / DCP)
Friday, May 19th & Saturday, May 20th

Scriptwriter-turned-director Walter Hill’s Hard Times (retitled The Streetfighter in Britain) received deservedly excellent reviews when it opened a few years back. His second feature [THE DRIVER] is even better, a combination of brilliantly edited car chases and existential thriller which recalls the sombreness of Melville and the spareness of Leone in a context which is the ‘classical’ economy of directors like Hawks and Walsh. A brilliant plot of cross and double-cross, with cop Dern out to nail ace getaway driver O’Neal, unravels with a tautness to put it on a par with the same year’s action hit, Assault on Precinct 13.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971 / DCP)
Friday, May 26th through Sunday, May 28th

“The French Connection is routinely included…on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time. What is not always remembered is what a good movie it is apart from the chase scene. It featured a great early Gene Hackman performance that won an Academy Award, and it also won Oscars for best picture, direction, screenplay and editing.

The story…involves a $32 million shipment of high-grade heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York hidden in a Lincoln Continental. A complicated deal is set up between the French people, an American money man and the Mafia. Doyle, a tough cop with a shaky reputation who busts a lot of street junkies, needs a big win to keep his career together. He stumbles on the heroin deal and pursues it with a single-minded ferocity that is frankly amoral. He isn’t after the smugglers because they’re breaking the law; he’s after them because his job consumes him.

In a sense, the whole movie is a chase. It opens with a shot of a French detective keeping the Continental under surveillance, and from then on the smugglers and the law officers are endlessly circling and sniffing each other. It’s just that the chase speeds up sometimes, as in the celebrated car-train sequence.” –Roger Ebert

MAD MAX (1979 / DCP)
Friday, June 2nd & Saturday, June 3rd

“George Miller’s film is an outrageous exploiter drawing intelligently on everything from Death Race 2000 to Straw Dogs for its JG Ballard-ish story about a future where cops and Hell’s Angels stage protracted guerrilla warfare around what’s left of a hapless civilian population… this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.” – Time Out (London)

WEEKEND (1967 / 35mm Print)
Friday, June 9th & Saturday, June 10, 2017

“Jean-Luc Godard’s WEEKEND, which was shown last night at the New York Film Festival, is a fantastic film, in which all of life becomes a weekend, and the weekend is a cataclysmic, seismic traffic jam—with cars running pedestrians and cyclists off the road, only to collide and leave blood and corpses everywhere.

“In one tremendously long take, the camera passes along a highway where traffic is stopped by a long line of dead, smashed, burned, and stalling vehicles—oil trucks, Renaults, sports cars, Mercedeses, a zoo truck with two llamas in it, recumbent tigers, people playing ball through the tops of their stalled Deux Chevaux, people playing cards, playing chess, honking horns, making gestures, quarreling, crying, and ignoring the fact that there is mayhem everywhere. The conception of the movie is very grand. It is as though the violent quality of life had driven Godard into and through insanity, and he had caught it and turned it into one of the most important and difficult films he has ever made.

“…The movie is interspersed with little essays, idylls, jokes, a Mozart sonata, a frantic love song sung by Jean-Pierre Léaud in a telephone booth, noise, rituals, battles with paint sprayers and tennis balls. It ends in slaughter and cannibalism. There are a lot of infantile pretentious touches, punning flashcards (Anal…lyse, Faux…tographie) and the subtitles seem to have caught a bit of this. “La Paresse” (laziness) is regularly translated as press.

“…But the film must be seen, for its power, ambition, humor, and scenes of really astonishing beauty. There are absurdist characters from Lewis Carroll, from Fellini, from La Chinoise, from Bu–uel. At many moments the movie, which is in color, captures the precise sense one has about the world, when one is in a city or in a rush, when one reads the headlines or obituary columns, when one drives, when one sets out, for that matter, on a weekend. It is as though the apocalypse had somehow registered on a sensibility calibrated very fine. It is an appalling comedy. There is nothing like it at all. It is hard to take.” – Renata Adler, New York Times

TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A (1985 / DCP)
Friday, June 16th & Saturday, June 17th

“Sure, the Reagan-era exoticization of painters and extras salivating over the cash they count are as dated as the Wang Chung synth score, but To Live and Die in L.A. is as urgent and exhilaratingly paced as anything William Friedkin’s done.

“This raw, elaborately cynical 1985 action flick puts two FBI agents (William Petersen, John Pankow) on the trail of a counterfeiting artist (Willem Dafoe at his most slithery) obsessed with spending money. Some of the best crook-on-crook, cop-on-crook banter there ever was and John Turturro’s best cursing in a motion picture . . . The six-lane rush-hour car chase would make Popeye Doyle crash and burn.” – Wesley Morris, San Francisco Examiner
 

THE ITALIAN JOB (1969 / DCP)
Friday, June 23rd & Saturday, June 24th

“As the Mini Coopers rock from side to side along a sewage tunnel, with £4 million in gold bullion in their boots and Quincy Jones’s infectious score swinging away in the background, ask yourself this: is there a film – certainly a British film – that delivers a greater infusion of pure joy than The Italian Job? The cast of this chirpily patriotic movie is led by Michael Caine, reprising his Alfie persona as Charlie Croker, a dollybird-friendly criminal who inherits a plan to rob the FIAT factory in Turin by causing the world’s largest traffic jam.

“But if Caine embodies Sixties cool, his presence is deliciously counterbalanced by the old-world charm of Noël Coward as Mr Bridger, the urbane, royalty-obsessed crimelord who treats his prison as his castle. Yet the true stars are the cars, in particular the red, white and blue Minis used to remove the loot from the scene, whizzing through the priceless palazzos and down the marble stairs with an abandon that makes the film’s shooting seem as much a joke on the Italians as its plot.

“…Its journey into Saturday-afternoon ubiquity has spawned endless repetition of its catchphrases (all together now: “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”), while its effortless style, and the glamour and comedic tics it lends its gangsters, are to blame for much of Guy Ritchie’s career. Yet the pure enjoyment it offers more than counterbalances these flaws. More to the point, the tight, witty script by Z Cars writer Troy Kennedy-Martin, smooth direction from Peter Collinson (Coward’s godson), and above all that glorious extended escape sequence, made by Jones’s wonderful score, power this film to a literal cliff-hanger ending that has become as iconic as the Mini Cooper itself. Just don’t tell anyone that the drivers were actually French.” –The Telegraph

Program notes from IFC Center NY.

COOLIDGE THEATRE MIDNIGHT UPDATE

The Coolidge Corner Theatre is always reliable for a fabulous midnight screening and heading into May, the Massachusetts institution has some brilliant 35mm additions to their late night lineup, including a Lost Boys 30th Anniversary special. Down an espresso or two and settle in;

NEAR DARK (35mm)
Friday, April 28th
Country boy Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) whittles away the quiet rural nights hunting local girls, but when he falls prey to the mysterious and beautiful Mae (Jenny Wright), he unknowingly becomes the hunted. Mae is no ordinary girl, she is part of an outlaw band of vampires (Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Joshua Miller) and their love is about to lure him into a terrifying world of bloodlust, mayhem and absolute horror.

POINT BREAK (1991, 35mm)
Saturday, April 29th
Academy Award winning director Katherine Bigelow has been making outstanding action films for a very long time. Even though Point Break did not win her the Oscar, it still remains the greatest American film of the 1990s.

A DARK SONG
Friday & Saturday, May 5th & 6th
An unholy alliance between two damaged souls leads them on a disturbing descent into the depraved realms of black magic. Sophia is a grieving mother desperate to make contact with her murdered son. Joseph is an anti-social, alcoholic expert in the occult who reluctantly agrees to help.

BODY DOUBLE (35mm)
Friday, April 5th
Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface) invites you to witness a seduction... a mystery... a murder. It's Body Double, a spine-tingling look at voyeurism and sexuality from the modern master of suspense.  De Palma has created a gripping adult thriller of eroticism and horror!

DRESSED TO KILL (35mm)
Saturday, May 6
At once tongue in cheek and scary as hell, Dressed to Kill revolves around the grisly murder of a woman in Manhattan and how her psychiatrist, her brainiac teenage son, and the prostitute who witnessed the crime try to piece together what happened while the killer remains at large.

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976, 35mm)
Friday, May 12 th
An isolated police station is in the process of relocation. Lt. Ethan Bishop is a dedicated cop overseeing the job. But when a busload of convicts make an unexpected pit-stop, the precinct becomes a scene of restless animosity and bubbling testosterone.

THEY LIVE (35mm)
Saturday, May 13th
You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they're people just like you. You're wrong. Dead wrong.

BRONSON (35mm)
Friday, May 19th
Before Tom Hardy broke the Bat in The Dark Knight Rises as the villainous Bane, he put in a stunning performance as another career convict in director Nicholas Winding Refn's film.
35mm print!

DRIVE
Saturday, May 20th
Ryan Gosling stars as a Los Angeles wheelman for hire, known only as "Driver", stunt driving for movie productions by day and steering getaway vehicles for armed heists by night.
 

THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE (35mm)
Friday, May 26th
One of the most personal films by Guillermo del Toro, The Devil's Backbone is also among his most frightening and emotionally layered.
35mm print!

PAN'S LABYRINTH (35mm)
Saturday, May 27th
Eleven-year-old Ofelia comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather, a sadistic captain in Franco's army, hunts down Republican guerrillas refusing to give up the fight.

THE LOST BOYS (35mm)
Saturday, June 3rd
30th annivesary screening! Back in the 80s vampires weren't cuddly vegetarians, easily slain by teenaged girls - they were the bad-ass extreme-livin' motorcycling undead who ruled Southern California with an iron fang.

EVIL DEAD 2 (35mm)
Friday, June 9th
Bruce Campbell reprises his iconic and career-making role of Ash, demonic zombie-fighting hero and part time S-Mart cashier. Be there as the Necronomicon Ex Mortis unleashes an evil that threatens to possess anyone with a pulse...again.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (35mm)
Saturday, June 10th
The last of the Elm Street kids are now at a psychiatric ward where Freddy haunts their dreams with unspeakable horrors. Their only hope is dream researcher and fellow survivor Nancy Thompson, who helps them battle the supernatural psycho on his own hellish turf.
 
ROBOCOP (1987, 35mm)
Friday, June 16
When the mind blowing ultra violence of "Old Detroit" becomes too much for it's police force to bear, local evil corporation OCP steps in to create the ultimate crime fighting machine!

PREDATOR (35mm)
Saturday, June 17
Major "Dutch" (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his team of special forces commandos have seen every atrocity our world has to offer, but on this recovery mission, something from another world entirely just may be death of them.

Program notes by The Coolidge.
 

AFTER MIDNIGHT AT THE COOLIDGE

Boston's Coolidge Corner delivers a knock out collection of classics for their midnight sessions this March and April including two influential martial arts greats and tributes to David Lynch, David Fincher, David Cronenberg and Kathryn Bigelow. Best of all, most films will be screening in 35mm format, which, in the case of Se7en especially, makes for essential viewing.

Friday March 10th
SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1980 / 35mm Print)
He whips out his sword and relieves his victims of their heads! More of a greatest hits movie than an actual stand-alone film of its own, Shogun Assassin is the delirious hybrid of two episodes of the popular Baby Cart series dubbed into English and fused together into a hyper-violent bloodbath ballet that's sure to entertain the samurai-film enthusiast with a strong stomach.

Saturday March 11th
LADY SNOWBLOOD 2: LOVE SONG OF VENGEANCE (1974)
Meiko Kaji returns in Toshiya Fujita's invigorating sequel to his own cult hit Lady Snowblood. Our furious heroine is captured by the authorities and sentenced to death for the various killings she has committed; however, she is offered a chance of escape-if she carries out dangerous orders for the government. More politically minded than the original, Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance is full of exciting plot turns and ingenious action sequences.

Friday March 17th
LEPRECHAUN (1993)
Celebrating St. Patrick's Day in Boston is always a horror scene, so why not cut to the chase spend the night with the Leprechaun!? A horrific Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) goes on a rampage after his precious bag of gold coins is stolen. He uses all of his magical destructive powers to trick, terrorize and kill anyone who is unlucky enough to hinder his search.
 
Saturday March 18th
THE DEPARTED (2006, 35mm Print)
Martin Scorsese's The Departed put Beantown back on the cinematic map in 2006. This South Boston-set tale of rats, within both the Irish mob and the state police force, is the perfect place to acquaint yourselves with the darker side of the city you call home.

Friday March 24th
NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979 / 35mm Print)
Since its release in 1979, Wener Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre has not only become one of the director's most acclaimed films, but one of the most compelling and visually-striking interpretations of the Dracula story ever committed to film.

 
Saturday March 25th
FITZCARRALDO (1972 / 35mm Print)
Iquitos is a town isolated in the middle of the jungle in Peru. At the turn of the century, one resident of the small town, "Fitzcarraldo" as the natives call him, has his dream of bringing together Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt for one great celebration of Grand Opera.

Friday & Saturday March 31st & April 1st
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015 / Black and Chrome Cut)
Haunted by his turbulent past, Mad Max believes the best way to survive is to wander alone. Nevertheless, he becomes swept up with a group fleeing across the Wasteland in a War Rig driven by an elite Imperator, Furiosa. Screens in the recent remastered B&W cut, which was Miller's original intention for the film.


Friday April 7th
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005 / 35mm Print)
In his first collaboration with director David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen is Tom Stall, a mild-mannered American husband and father, who may be harboring a violent secret. When two murderous men attempt to rob Tom's small town diner, he reacts with reflexive precision in dispatching the villains. Immediately dubbed a hero, the media attention that follows brings more than just skeletons out of Tom's closet.

 
Saturday April 8th
EASTEEN PROMISES (2007 / 35mm Print)
As the imposing and heavily tattooed gangster Nikolai, Viggo Mortensen once again masterfully portrays a duplicitous, yet honorable, character for director David Cronenberg. When midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) finds the diary of a recently deceased young mother and attempts to have it translated from Russian, she is led down a path that places her firmly in the grasp of the London underworld.

Friday April 14th
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992 / 35mm Print)
Return to the idyllic Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks before homecoming queen Laura Palmer's grisly death tipped the community on its head. As with the best Lynch films, the seedy underbelly of an otherwise picture perfect town is revealed to be even more disturbing than anyone could have imagined.

Saturday April 15th
LOST HIGHWAY (1997)
Bill Pullman is jazz saxophonist Fred Madison and Patricia Arquette is his wife, Renee. They begin to receive mysterious packages containing videotapes of their own house. Each tape brings the unknown peeper farther into their dwelling, ultimately resulting in a video recording of Renee's murder.

Friday April 21st
SE7EN (1995 / 35mm Print)
In an unidentified city rife with urban and moral decay, two homicide detectives, retiring veteran William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and newly transferred David Mills (Brad Pitt), hunt for a serial killer who meticulously stages each murder based on one of the seven deadly sins. Stunning in 35mm.

Saturday April 22nd
THE GAME (1997 / 35mm Print)
The enormously wealthy and emotionally remote investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) receives a strange gift from his ne'er-do-well younger brother (Sean Penn) on his forty-eighth birthday: a voucher for a game that, if he agrees to play it, will change his life.
 
Friday April 28th
NEAR DARK (1987 / 35mm Print)
Country boy Caleb Colton whittles away the quiet rural nights hunting local girls, but when he falls prey to the mysterious and beautiful Mae, he unknowingly becomes the hunted. Mae is no ordinary girl, she is part of an outlaw band of vampires and their love is about to lure him into a terrifying world of bloodlust, mayhem and absolute horror. 30th Anniversary.

Saturday April 29th
POINT BREAK (1991 / 35mm Print)
Academy Award winning director Katherine Bigelow has been making outstanding action films for a very long time. Even though Point Break did not win her the Oscar, it still remains the greatest American film of the 1990s. Far superior to the atrocious 12016 remake.

Program notes by The Coolidge.